Slashdot Mirror
On Social Networks, You Are Who You Know
santosh maharshi writes "On social networks like Facebook, even if you have kept your profile very private, people can just look at your friends list and infer lots of vital information about you. Most of the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn allow people to see your picture and your friends list as part of the open access for visitors (the article says that only 5% of Facebook users have bothered to hide their friends list). In a study titled You Are Who You Know: Inferring User Profiles in Online Social Networks (PDF), conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, an algorithm was tested that can accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users simply by looking at their friend lists. 'At Rice [University], the algorithm accurately predicted the correct dormitory, graduation year, and area of study for the many of the students. In fact, among these undergraduates, researchers found that “with as little as 20 percent of the users providing attributes we can often infer the attributes for the remaining users with over 80 percent accuracy."'"
with common tastes. News at 11.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Hasn't this been known since the beginning of time?
The things they found out aren't things most people have any reason to keep secret. OK, if you see that most of my Facebook friends went to Cowpie High or Mediocre State University, and you'll realize that I, too, probably went to Cowpie High and Mediocre State. So what? Mediocre State is on my (sometimes publicly available) resume, and it's not like its any secret that I went to Cowpie High either. (and yes, the school's actual nickname among the students was that)
Much more interesting would be if they could figure things which people are trying to keep private. Where they buried the bodies of their "missing" parents, if they're gay but in the closet (I think there already was an article about that over a year ago, though), membership in the Secret Order of Inquisitors and Torturers (friending Dick Cheney is the giveaway here), etc.
While the study proves a fairly obvious hypothesis, what your social network could say about you could go a lot deeper than that. It's not much of a leap to determine religion, politics, sexual orientation or various other things that people don't fully consider, or could even be used to violate equal opportunity housing or hiring laws. I think there are a lot of great things about social networking, and facebook in particular, but the how it's changing cultural views and expectations of privacy is shocking and fast, and I don't think we'll have perspective on whats happening for years to come.
but college students are some of the most strongly connected people around. They are more likely to be friends with their neighbors (who all share their age and occupation), Facebook adoption rates in their social circle are very high, and they have a very strong overlap between work, living arrangements and social life.
This isn't generally worrisome for the rest of us, who aren't Facebook friends with everyone on our street or office building.
No wonder so many slashdotters post as anonymous cowards!
A potential employeur might use this algorithm to predict my graduation year and area of study instead of just looking at the resume I sent him?
Scary.
I'm sure that marketing companies have known this for years. The give-away is when they get it wrong. I get lots of adverts for cheap calls to India and for services to "send money home". I'm not Indian but most of my friends are.
This is why I'm highly selective about my friends.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This only works assuming the public use of Facebook is ubiquitous. If only half of your friends are on the network, or if only half of them allow information about them to be publicly visible, the accuracy of the predictions will suffer greatly. This in turn means that the algorithm will more accurately predict the traits of people who have the trait of not caring about their online privacy. It's a calculation based on an assumption. In other words, bollocks.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
This is yet another "correlation does not mean causation" result from a university. Which does lead me to correlate that universities are a possible cause of a lot of bad/worthless research these days. This study certainly seems to fall into that category. God only knows how people get funding for this kind of study.
I have Facebook "friends" that I barely know, people I've not seen in decades, people I once worked with. I'd be astonished if you can draw ANY accurate conclusions about me from any of those connections. You MAY be able to draw some conclusions about SOME people from their friends list. But even if you can, is that info really of any real use? Yes, advertisers might buy it, but really they are buying fool's gold.
Stereotypes work.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
If you want to see just how much of 'you' (and anyone else in the US) there is out there for all to see, go to Spokeo and type in your name. It got my marital status wrong and had a few gaps regarding interests. But my address was on the button and it provided the view of my house from Google StreetView. Just in case I win the lottery and someone wants to kidnap me...
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
What happens in Vegas, stays on facebook
Here is a list of my references.
You may now return to regular daily activities of checking your cell phone every 10 minutes and reading Fartbook.
Yours In Ufa,
Kilgore Trout
I friended an old colleague of mine who has a prominent sales position at a tech firm, and was curious why he hid his friend list. So I browsed his news and watched his wall for ahwile and soon realized he just didn't want people to know he was gay. It wasn't blatent, but you could tell that a large number of people leaving messages were loudly gay, talking about gay iissues like gay marriage, etc..
Of course I never knew this whan I actually worked with him, and we litterally spent man weeks together at customer sites - although I afterwards realized that he was very good looking and never seemed to have a current girl friend, only talked about ex's. It all fit really.
So the article struck a chord with me.
it seems like a giant ego bonfire, it seems like a massive waste of time to tweak minor pointless trivia about your social life. just the very thought of it fills me with tedium and exhaustion. it seems to reinforce the worst aspects of people's personalities: their vanity, their shallowness, and their mediocrity. i mean who really fucking cares, including yourself, about this running narrative about the pointless banalities of your life?
and now i find the someone, in fact, does care: the demons of id theft and invasion of privacy and spam marketing... as invited into your life, by your own vanity
do the best thing you can ever do for yourself: lose facebook. don't go to another social networking site, just simply drop completely off the radar of this fad whose only value is to reinforce and amplify the worst parts of your personality, and to turn you into fodder to be harvested by search spiders and marketing algorithms
you've offered your life up to harvesting by a depersonalizing machine. grow some character by becoming real, and lose the ridiculous mask called facebook. if the lunch meat called spam became the catchword for depersonalized email message, i'd like to offer that social networking be known as soylent green: it's people! social networking sites like facebook are everyday people, ground up, processed and extruded into depersonalized marketing diarrhea: soylent green
why would you do that to yourself? teenagers: you are exempt, its a useful tool for social exploration. anyone older than 24: you're pathetic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... and I will tell you who you are. Nothing new here please move along.
A lot of replies to this seem to be dismissing it as irrelevant. Yes, social networks are not private. But determining aspects of your identity that you yourself do not choose to post can have serious implications. Project Gaydar at MIT showed that it was possible to determine sexual orientation via social networks. In many parts of the world, including the US, this matters. As might information about what preexisting medical conditions you might have...
oh wow, in an extremely closed and controlled system (university) they can find out my major, dorm, and year I graduated...wow, I'm stunned by the power of that algorithm. This is so silly, I'm sure that by looking at my friends addresses one can probably tell which neighborhood I live in, but that's about it. Big deal.
When I was in middle school during the mid-90's (I turn 26 next month), I started getting into chat rooms (as many people did around that time.) My parents taught me from an early age to be very aware of what information I put out there, and it has served me quite well. I rarely talk about work, and if I do it is done in a very generic, non-identifiable way. Most of my friends on social networking sites are from K-12, and I use it primarily to keep in contact with them.
Living With a Nerd
This might work pretty well for a small, relatively tight group like students at a particular university. I bet it gets worse as we get out into the real world and develop friends with wider interests from different backgrounds.
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
Birds of a feather flock together.
Damn! Mama was right again. And the researchers didn't figure it out until 30 years later.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Has a gazillion "friends" for FarmVille- does that have any correlation with her real relationships? I think not.
Man, I hate it when I see the 20-80 rule, because now I know it's bullshit.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
You know, now with such "research", social science people will be rattling on about it as if it became a solid scientific finding "backed by research", rather than a conventional wisdom that it really is and remains so.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I assure you, me becoming the savior of the world by crashing the databases of these creeps is entirely inadvertent. My real regret is that I have not yet been able to crash the real world.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Facebook has now changed their policy to eliminate privacy, in particular, friend lists are always public. At one time you could make this private, as noted in this report. I made my own friend list private when I first joined it, but Facebook now ignores my configuration. If you can make friend lists private, please let know how... it sure isn't easy, and Facebook's current documentation says that it cannot be made private.
Making public the private data you gave a company, without your consent, should be illegal.... but it appears that Facebook can do it with impunity. I've mostly stopped using Facebook because Facebook seems to be becoming actively hostile to privacy of any kind.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
For anyone who isn't clear on why Facebook and Twitter are so valuable, this study is yet another example of how much rich information is embedded in social network data. It's easy to imagine applications for pulling information out of social network data. Who would be interested in such data? Advertisers, ex-girlfriends, social researchers, police detectives, anti-terrorism, intelligence agencies... the list goes on and on. Pretty much any project with interests in the social world would benefit from social networking data. It's valuable. Why you would give away your social networking data to Facebook, Twitter, or Google for free?
Go to www.zabasearch.com and type in your name.
It will probably turn up a few addresses. Now all that's left is to geo-locate your IP address and dump the addresses close to that location onto Google Maps.
Even if you have an unlisted phone number your address is easy to find.
Mama says alligators are ornery cause they got all dem teeth and no toothbrush.
"What is there a tank on the boat? WHY IS THERE A TANK ON THE BOAT?!?" L4D2
You went go college and studied computer science, achieving at least an Associates Degree. You usually wear decent clothing (slacks, button-shirt, etc.) not jeans and tee shirts.
You are a sysadmin and use BSD, GNU/Linux, AIX, IRIX and SunOS/Solaris but GNU/Linux exclusively on your personal PC (but think Macs are okay and are quite capable at using them as well), think Windows OSes barely qualify for the "OS" label, know what a Vax is and even know your way around VMS, and are a first rate perl-monger.
You think emacs is of the devil and probably have many esoteric vi command keys memorized.
While you surf the intarwebs regularly you know there were tubes before webs and still read Usenet on occasion.
You are fairly libertarian but likely not a card-carrying member of the Libertarian party.
Furthermore, you are an avid reader and at one time played DOOM way too much.
Oh, and despite all this, you found someone who loved you enough to accept your marriage proposal.
I could tell you more about yourself but that's just what I got in the first 60 seconds.
brilliant
mod parent +7
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
sexual orientation
Look at the bright side of it: Use Facebook for search of potential mates. One glance at "mutual friends" => instant gaydar.
And the best thing: those who are not member of "the family" have a much harder time to figure it out (they'll need to actually visit your friends' pages one by one and hope that those aren't closeted either...)
So it's a good thing: it reveals info to those people who should know, while reasonably hiding it from those who shouldn't.
I friended most of my high school classmates, whom are all morons. I'm not. I just didn't want to be rude.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
For a while the question from my perspective has been how long until we live in a panopticon not what can I do to keep privacy on the web ? The results in the article are pretty obvious, the only way to keep information secret about yourself seems to become a hermit and use technologies from two centuries ago.
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
The last time I was looking for a job, I searched my name on Google and came up with a lot of hits that had nothing to do with me. Some were good, some were bad. In all, there were at least four distinct people on the first six pages of hits, with my name.
For example, there was one person who is a police officer in another state that was on the first page. If someone were to mistake me for that person, I wouldn't mind. However, there is no way someone would mistake me for him, due to age, occupation, and location differences.
Another person on the first page was someone I definitely did NOT want to be mistaken for. Unfortunately, this person works in IT, went to school in the same state as I did, and is just a couple years younger than I am. The possibility for mistaking me for this person was rather high.
There are a few ways I could fix this problem, but most would take way too long. I could publish some papers, speak at conferences, etc., but that would take years to get me on the first page of search results. Alternatively, I could make my Facebook profile public, even though it wouldn't have as much impact. It was perfectly clean, since I don't participate in any questionable activities (street racing, binge drinking, drugs, bad-mouthing bosses, etc). I also don't include information about religion/politics. My friends have similar values that I do, so even if someone were to infer information about me based on them, they would have every reason to believe that I am a normal, decent person, with strong morals and good character. Sure, this won't immediately get the real me to show up on the first page of search results, but it was a quick and simple thing that got me moving toward my goal.
What you fail to understand is that while *you* understand that you can't predict anything about you in the logically-provable sense, if you are accused of a crime, a jury of your (COUGH) peers decides your fate.
They're not going to ask, "Can we prove this in an epistemilogical sense?" No, they're going to ask, "Does it look like he would do that?" and, "What if we're wrong, and he really is a terrorist?" The fact that you are "linked to a known terrorist" via Facebook will be sufficient. Maybe you really are curious about why someone would commit suicide bombings, about their mindset, the desperation which could drive someone to do such things, or... Maybe you're planning to blow up a school. Wouldn't it be safer to just put you away "just in case?"
The aggregation of data from sites such as Facebook, etc... makes it all that much easier for a prosecutor to prosecute *someone* for a crime irrespective of their actual innocence. Someone who can be linked to a crime via this massive surveillance network is more likely to plead guilty than take their chances with a lengthy and costly court battle. Unlike God, our legal system is about the *appearance* of justice, rather than the actuality thereof. (If you need evidence, consider that the discovery of additional evidence, even exculpatory evidence, is insufficient grounds for a new trial even in capital cases; rather, to get a new trial, the appellant must show that a *procedural* error was committed.)
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
There are a couple of things here...
1) *IF* facebook still exists in 10-15 years, and is still popular then, how many people who have graduated and moved on will still update facebook? Is there the potential for forgotten information to be used against them? For example, your forgotten facebook profile has you listed with a person from Pakistan as being friends and you apply for a job that requires a security clearance..
2) For people who are no longer in school, what does this say, if anything? Or is it exponentially more difficult then? Or rather than college, does it apply to work? For example, if X % of your friends all work for company Y and part of that X% is person A but they're all friends with everyone else in that X%, does that also imply that they once worked for company Y? (This seems rather obvious...)
3) What about the exclusions? For example, if you have a group of 20 people and they're all friends with each other except one pair, what does that tell you about the relationship between those two? What are the odds that they've (a) had a disagreement and no longer talk (b) were in a relationship and broke up (c) don't need facebook to know they're friends or (d) just not friends?
Of course, being AC (and thus friendless), I qualify for (3).
I see a correlation between the 20% of friends and 80% success rate. So all they have to do is gather data from 0% of friends, and they're 100% likely to guess the user's info!
--Edward Dassmesser
Yeah, i know that too, in my case i always get adverts in Facebook like "Do you want to have a girlfriend?" from online dating sites, so i have to say the marketing companies are doing a good job detecting my desperation.
Only people on my friends list on Facebook even know I'm on Facebook, and they already know me. My account is quite well locked down, there's no evidence of my existance unless you're on my friends list, and even the email that FB has for me is a special one used only there, so there's no linking me that way either.
FB could make some inferences since they have the data. But not anyone else. Yes, I've blocked every app too.
Sounds like they hit the nail on the head with you, even though you're not Indian.
Think about it - maybe s/he makes plenty of calls to India, or has family there?
it seems like a massive waste of time to...
If people enjoy using Facebook, and their enjoyment of Facebook with all its banalities doesn't affect me, why do I care what they do? I have my own ways of wasting time, they have theirs.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's valuable. Why you would give away your social networking data to Facebook, Twitter, or Google for free?
Actually you don't give it for free---you in fact pay them for the privilege of giving them that info (indirectly, via ads). Presumably you get something in return though.
I do agree with you on the value; personal information is a commodity, and as a commodity that is inherently mine, if you want it you should have to get my consent.
A software-licensing scheme seems like the perfect solution for personal information: you only lease my information; that doesn't give you the right to resell it, you may only use it as I explicitly direct, and I can withdraw your permissions at any time for any reason.
A licensing scheme might very well work to make social networking services more transparent and accountable to their users, I agree. But until there is more general awareness of the extent to which social networking data is valuable, I think people will underestimate how unfair the bargain is when you sign up for services like Facebook. It's true that Facebook users get a valuable service in exchange for handing over their personal information. The relationship asymmetrically advantages Facebook, though, especially given the terms of service that allow Facebook to retain reuse your information virtually in perpetuity. It's also worth noting that most computing professionals (aka Slashdotters) will be completely unaware of how sophisticated social network analysis really is in 2010. Network analysis been a growing subfield of sociology for decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis
I don't have a facespacester account, but I've been thinking that I probably need to sign up sooner or later. So, in order to mitigate the privacy threats, I'm looking at creating domain-specific accounts. One for my high-school friends, another for 'professional' use, another for family, another for hookups, etc.
Anyone know if there is a plugin for firefox (or any other browser actually) that facilitates this approach? I think I saw an app a few days ago that was designed to amalgamate different accounts (one friendster, one myspace, one facebook, etc, kind of like pidgin does for chat systems). Something like that plus going the extra steps to spoof the user-agent so that any automated correlation system on those sites would at least think I was a bunch of different users behind a firewall rather than probably the same guy with a bunch of accounts.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Geography can be determined by ip, so nothing new is given up there. Besides whoever puts up those "find your classmates" banners who else would find where my dog graduated high school to be useful? I could see some inference to age being valuable to determine my dog's membership in a target demographic, what else is commercially valuable with the information this dude can glean?
"...ex-girlfriends..."
This is Slashdot, you insensitive clod!
You have to realize that people use social networks for different things.
My nephew, who is 2 weeks old, has a FB page, so that my sis and brother-in-law can post pics and vids and news about him, as well as "friend" relatives from that page.
Technically, I'm very very popular, which was true before games became a thing on FB, but the addition of games has caused my popularity to explode, so that now you might surmise I have a lot of conservative southern friends, but that would be incorrect, as I just play games with them, and delete their posts on my Wall most of the time.
In addition, some of my friends have multiple accounts, some of which are for historical or ficitional personae (e.g. famous environmentalists or writers in the 18th century), which have "friends" who like that personae, in addition to being used as spare accounts in games to get around game limits.
People trust the Internet far more than they should. Just because Google tells you something, or it's on a Wiki, does NOT mean it is true or WAS true. We're all SCA personae, partially based on our own selves or an aspect of our selves, and partially based on a mythology or activity that we overexpress in the context of the network.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
To compete with the people who are doing it for profit. I have some small amount of control over my own information. If I "opt out", then plenty of other companies will do it for me.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
It should be noted that Rice is different from most US universities in that students stay at the same residential college (dorm) for all four years of undergrad. It's probably harder to deduce for other universities - though probably still easier than inferring major.
I like targeted marketing based on my personal information/friends/interests. It seems to make sense to allow marketers into that part of your consumer life because it makes everyone's job easier. It's easier for them to push ads that you might be interested in and it's easier for you to find merchandise and services that you're actually interested in. The gleaning of this type of information is only going to get more detailed and hopefully the marketing based on this information more intelligent. Pandora's Box is opened and can't be shut so I hope at least they use the information for my benefit as well as theirs.
Still obvious. Very Obvious. Not insightful. Bad mods. Need to be beaten with a clue stick.
So?
None of my ex-girl friends want to know anything or have anything to do with me. At least, that's what they say each time, after I track them down again.
I drank what? -- Socrates
the article says that only 5% of Facebook users have bothered to hide their friends list
Not that I use Facebook much, but I did try to hide as much as possible. But when I logged in Facebook a month or so later, Facebook "helpfully" showed me a page, ostensibly to give me a "higher control" of my privacy settings. This page had all the privacy settings marked the equivalent of "publicly visible" and if I wanted to hide them again, I would have to painstakingly do this for each of the settings (a 2 step process for about 8 items). I couldn't see any obvious way to "mark all private", or even to keep the status quo. But a simple "OK" would mark all the items as publicly visible. I went ahead and did that painstaking process to ensure my privacy but it has been 2 months, and I haven't logged back in.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again."
"Watch your six!"
(and I DO wish /. would get around to using JS that works on browsers other than FF and maybe IE...)